Overextension and the Market of Opinion

In linguistics, we call this phenomenon overextension and it is, of course, a very practical process of language learning. The child can talk away, and thereby grasp the basic structure of the language, while the adult environment (with fairly good accuracy) can interpret the meaning of what is being said. Later, as the child learns more characters and the vocabulary is expanded, the scope of words is reduced and the child understands more and more about the world.

This is a very pretty picture of human development.

A similar course of events we can find in the adult world, though it works in the opposite direction. In a fairly steady stream, specialised concepts from academia or from history are caught up and served as slogans in the public debate. Some of these are perceived, for social psychological or economic reasons, to be exceptionally palatable and will therefore be used in more and more contexts. For this growth to be possible requires that the concept’s original meaning is expanded, so that its original negative or positive meaning can be applied to more and more things. This development usually ends with the total collapse of its meaning.

This picture is not as beautiful as the previous one. As an example of the overextension of a positive concept, we can take sustainable development, which is usually associated with the UN’s so-called Brundtland Report of 1987, but was actually coined by the environmental campaigner, Lester Brown, back in the 70s. The original UN definition was: “Economic and social development that meets the needs of the current generation without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1997).

Today, there’s no research project, grant-seeking activity, or any commercial product that does not describe itself as ‘sustainable’, and the word is becoming more or less parodic. The economic mechanism behind this development is only too obvious. Not as obvious, perhaps, are the driving forces behind the bizarre overuse of the pejorative and stigmatising term racism, but you cannot ignore the obvious opportunities it provides to spread itself into the gaps and develop its ‘brand’. Few editors say no to a piece that contains a racist accusation, especially if this is combined with a personal attack.

When the original and scientific definition of racism, which alluded to inherited properties, was extended through overuse to mean the general disapproval between groups, it was time for universities to adapt to the funding market. We then got ‘structural racism’, which in the popular version is defined as follows by the Equality Ombudsman:

Often, people connect racism to something that only happens in extreme right-wing groups, but racism is a part of all our actions and ways of thinking in an unconscious way. It is about ordinary, everyday actions such as language, invisibility, prejudiced comments, and the denial of the experience of racism – a kind of everyday racism.

Undeniably, this is a highlight of the Western self-whipping tradition.

With this expansion – to take someone from the Google pile – Karim Jebari, a doctoral student in philosophy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, can in his blog note that ”Swedes are, like all other peoples, racists”. There is a parallel with Gudrun Schyman’s famous ‘Taliban speech’, where Swedish men were likened to religious fundamentalists. It’s the same kind of power structures here and there, she said.

So is created the perfect financial bubble in the market of opinions. If language is allowed to flow in this way, it will create infinite room for accusations of racism or oppression of women, regardless of what society looks like. Careers can be created on an assembly line.

But, as Sweden is not only one of the most equal countries in the world, but also one of the most immigrant-friendly (the latter according to the research reported elsewhere in this issue), one must ask the question: what will be the long-term effects on society if we, in the public debate, describe Sweden as a country of racists and oppressors of women, even though we, by international comparison, seem tolerant and equal?

Would not it be better for everyone involved if we expressed pride at what has been achieved, while we also pay attention to the problems that remain to be solved?

There’s an obvious risk that the bubble will burst and that various groups in society, with too great a zeal, try to correct what they perceive as a false picture of society.